Micron said it made the announcement following a Thursday approval by the Tokyo District Court allowing Elpida's trustees to negotiate an agreement with Micron. If an agreement is reached, Micron would become Elpida's sponsor and acquire Elpida's entire business in accordance with the corporate reorganization proceedings, Elpida said.

According to Micron, Elpida decided to move forward with Micron as its sponsor after the auction process, which closed last week.

After making an initial bid to acquire Elpida, SK Hynix Inc. reportedly dropped out of the bidding last week. According to reports, the only other final bid was a combined bid from Chinese investment firm Hony Capital teamed with U.S. private equity firm TPG.

Analysts have speculated that a Micron acquisition of Elpida would remake the DRAM landscape, substantially increasing Micron's market share while also reducing the total amount of DRAM capacity, which would improve pricing. Many observers believe that Micron would convert some of Elpida's fab capacity to NAND flash memory production.

Wow-really? They must be publicly lying then:
http://www.micronblogs.com/
Click into "Don’t Miss Micron’s Take on DRAM and NAND Markets
" then the Jefferies 2012 Global TMT Conference link
And where's your 37 nm from? Have a link?

The tool set required to produce DRAM and NAND is very similar. Micron (and any other player in both businesses) has some freedom to shift wafer starts from one to the other, even within the same fab, depending on which has the higher margins at any given time.

Hynix reportedly switched its Wuxi DRAM fab to NAND. If Micron similarly converts Elpida facilities to NAND, then we are not seeing it beef up its position in DRAM but rather keeping up in NAND. However, didn't hear about Samsung converting its DRAM resources.